“...Not By Faith Alone”

A sermon based upon James 2: 14-26

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

Sunday September 6th, 2020 (Growing In Grace)

Happy Labor Day Weekend!    I find it quite interesting that today’s Scripture passage is about having a Faith that ‘works’ or ‘labors’.  I didn’t plan this.  All I planned was to be preaching on Spiritual Growth passages from the New Testament books in the order they are believed to have been written.  It just worked out this way.  It’s one of those coincidences that invites us to think beyond the coincidence.

And speaking of thinking, it would be good for you to put on your ‘thinking caps’ for understanding today’s biblical text.  This text will require some serious laborious, and deeper thinking.   Even in the King James Version, James writes: Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. (2:24)

When James appears to question whether ‘faith alone’ can save you and me, he is getting into some ‘deep’ territory.   It seems like he’s going against what most of the New Testament says about salvation by grace through faith and not by works (Eph. 2: 8-9).  It also seems like he’s going against what Paul, the first great missionary-theologian wrote: “For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds…(Rom. 3:20)…he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26)   It even seems like he’s going against what the great reformers said in the five great ‘Solas’ (Latin for ‘by only’) of the reformation:  we are saved, sola scriptura, sola fida,  sola gratia, solus Christus, and soli deo Gloria;  by Scripture alone, by faith alone, by grace alone, by Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. 

If this is not what James meant, he needed to explain himself, but he doesn’t.  He does say some other very important things, which is why his letter made it into our Bible.  But still, it was because of this very text that Martin Luther called James’ letter ‘an epistle made of straw’’.  And indeed, it does sound as if he is going against Paul, against what the Reformed and even the Baptist Faith was founded upon.   How did something that sounds so contradictory  the ‘righteousness by faith in Jesus’ slip into this ‘New Testament ‘by (his) blood’ (Luke 22:20)?

Didn’t I just say this was going to be a ‘put on your thinking cap’ message?  If you normally don’t think this much, today, if you understand what’s being said, you’ll have to grow in your spiritual and biblical maturity.  Today, you will have to ‘put an end to childish ways, as Paul said (1 COR. 13:11) and grow into the kind of knowledge he called ‘perfect’, which means mature or adult-like (1 COR. 13:10) Unfortunately, not everyone grows up into this kind of spiritual maturity of thought, but today’s Scripture can help you make a step forward, if you will.

FAITH APART FROM WORKS… (18)

So, first, let’s try to understand why James was so upset about, that he called people who would trust in being saved by faith alone ‘senseless’ (v. 20).  This word ‘senseless’ means ‘dim witted’ and it’s a very strong word for Christians to be throwing around at each other, don’t you think?     

Hearing Christians disagree like this is why many people don’t like church and what many also don’t like about the Bible.    It’s just not always clear, they say.   It seems too contradictory at places.   It requires too much study, too much reading, and too much work to understand.    For instance, in Genesis chapter 1, God is said to create light before he creates the Sun (cp. 1: 3; 17ff).   How could that happen?  Or, how about the infamous question about Cain, who after killing his only brother.  By the Genesis storyline, Cain’s brother Abel appears to be the only other human in the world besides Adam and Eve, but then, we are told how Cain runs away to get married.  Where did Can get his wife (4:17)?   And what about the really big one.   Compare the very same story being told in 2 Samuel to how it is stated differently in 1^st Chronicles: In 2 Samuel 1: 24 it reads: “The LORD'S anger against Israel flared again, and he incited David against the Israelites by prompting him to number Israel and Judah.   But in 1 Chronicles 21:1 it reads: “And Satan rose up against Israel, and he enticed David into taking a census of Israel.”   Equating the Lord’s anger to Satan?  Now that’s really does require some thinking, explaining and further reading, doesn’t it?  

Of course, some will say that’s the Old Testament, but right here, in today’s text, the New Testament requires thinking too.   Why is James so intent on making every ‘saved-by-grace-through-faith’ Christians upset and angry?   And why is this Bible, which has for us the ‘words of life’, so difficult to understand at times?  When it comes to life and death, which in the Bible means questions about ‘eternal life’ and ‘eternal death’, shouldn’t James have been a little more careful with his words?   

 Perhaps you’ve heard about the young minister who was being interviewed for his first pastorate. The Pulpit Committee had invited him to come over to their church for the interview. The committee chairman asked, "Son, do you know the Bible pretty good?"

     The young minister said, "Yes, pretty good."  

The chairman asked, "Which part do you know best?"

He responded saying, "I know the New Testament best."

"Which part of the New Testament do you know best," asked the chairman.

The young minister said, "Several parts."

The chairman said, "Well, why don't you tell us the story of the Prodigal Son."

The young man said, "Fine."    "There was a man of the Pharisees name Nicodemus, who went down to Jericho by night and he fell upon stony ground and the thorns choked him half to death.   "The next morning Solomon and his wife, Gomorrah, came by, and carried him down to the ark for Moses to take care of.  But, as he was going through the Eastern Gate into the Ark, he caught his hair in a limb and he hung there forty days and forty nights and he afterwards did hunger. And, the ravens came and fed him.

      "The next day, the three wise men came and carried him down to the boat dock and he caught a ship to Nineveh.   When he got there he found Delilah sitting on the wall.  He said, "Chunk her down, boys, chunk her down." And, they said, "How many times shall we chunk her down, till seven time seven?" And he said, "Nay, but seventy times seven." And they chunk her down four hundred and ninety times. "And, she burst asunder in their midst. And they picked up twelve baskets of the leftovers. And, in the resurrection whose wife shall she be?"

     With this, the Committee chairman interrupted the young minister and said to the remainder of the committee, "Fellows, I think we ought to ask the church to call him as our minister.   I know he’s awfully young, but he sure does know his Bible." http://www.gospelweb.net/ChurchHumor8/NewPastorsBibleKnowledge.htm

FAITH…BROUGHT TO COMPLETION… (22)

           Perhaps most of us know the most important part of the Bible’s message:   God loves us.  Jesus died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.   Jesus rose from the dead.   Of course, this is the main Christian message of the Bible and it’s wonderful, but even our knowledge of these most important ‘truths’ in the Bible is partial.   As Paul once told the Corinthians, we only know ‘in part’ until the perfect comes (1 Cor. 13:9).  The perfect knowledge still has not yet come (1 Cor. 13:10).  Though some think it already has.   Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that this Holy Bible, which is divinely ‘inspired’ (God breathed), Paul says, ‘and is useful…for training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16), is inspired by God, but it’s still a book written by fallible and imperfect human beings were still ‘growing’ in knowledge and understanding.   Sometimes we forget or ignore this ‘human’ side of the Bible, and people can lose faith because they can’t distinguish between the human part of the Bible and the divine part.

     In a recent book about the Bible’s as God inspired truth, Pastor Gregory Boyd, writes how as a young Christian he went to the University and became confused to learn about this ‘human side’ of the Bible.   This became especially sharp and difficult when he learned how a literal reading of the Bible contradicts what humans know from Science.  Learning this, he lost his faith, at least for a while.  

    Later, however, after meeting a new Christian friend on campus, Boyd started to grow deeper in his understanding of the Bible.   He came back to the Bible, not as a fully ‘finished’ book, but as more of an ongoing conversation.   He came to understand that knowing God, knowing Jesus, and knowing the Bible too, can only happen through accepting the humiliation, weakness, and preaching of the cross. (INSPIRED IMPERFECTION: How the Bible’s Problems Enhance Its Divine Authority Copyright © 2020 Gregory A. Boyd. Published by Fortress Press).

Only by fully accepting the human side of the Bible, that is, by acknowledging and accepting the ‘imperfections’ of the Bible, did he fully gain the most important knowledge of all.   This is that God inspired the Bible, not for us to worship perfect words, but God inspired all Scripture to point us to Jesus, who is the perfect Word of God being expressed in human form.  As Jesus said, “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; …it is they that bear witness to me.”  (Jn. 5:39 RSV).   

      Now, of course, it takes some maturity, some growing up, and some humility and some human effort too.   That’s what Greg Boyd had to do both in his mind and in his heart.  He had to grow up in his understanding of the Bible or lose his faith in Jesus as the Christ.   He didn’t need to throw the Bible away, because it is humanly written just like he needed to understand what it means that a humanly written book is also divinely inspired.  This isn’t ‘double-talk’ nor is it a trick.   It’s the way all truth comes to human beings.   First, we have a ‘child-like’ knowledge, but then, if we keep working, growing, and maturing, we will grow up and become mature in this knowledge.   But this ‘growth’ and ‘maturity’ doesn’t happen by accident.   It’s a gift from God, but it can still require a lot of ‘hard work’.

     In this way, it’s very important, especially when we read something like we are reading today in the letter of James, not to read the Bible as a ‘closed book’.   A ‘closed book’ or ‘letter’ can quickly become a ‘dead letter’.  You know what happens to ‘dead letters’ in the ‘dead letter office’, don’t you?  They never reach their destination.  Even though they might have been very nicely and perfectly written and finished, since addressee can’t be found, they are considered ‘dead’.    

     The Bible isn’t a ‘dead letter’, it’s a living truth.    But this living and divine truth still has to fit and accommodate our human, limited, but growing understanding.   And since the Bible’s truth must enter our ongoing story it is more like an ongoing dialogue than a ‘closed book’.   The moral, spiritual, and eternal truths revealed in the Bible are not ‘closed’, but they must come to us as open-ended, given to us in ‘partially’, so we ourselves, each on our own spiritual journeys, might be able to join the conversation and accept God’s invitation to find living and saving truth.

    When it comes to growing up, we all must realize, as adults must do, that the Bible, just like life, is more complicated than we once thought.   But also, when we grow in this very mature way of reading the Bible, we’ll also find that by accepting this challenge God’s eternal truth can be discovered by humans just like us.

 FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS…DEAD (26)

      So, if the Bible invites us into God’s ‘ongoing’ conversation of truth, what indeed is James inviting us to think about, when here, James is saying the ‘opposite’ of what we normally think?  Is there way that we can, as the Bible says, ‘rightly divide’ (or explain, 2 Tim. 2:15) what James when he seems to question whether ‘faith can save’ us alone, without good works (2:14)?

What we need to understand, which I think helps us start to ‘grow’ up in our own faith and reading of the Bible, is why James was writing in the first place.    The ‘context’ of James words are very important, just as the context of all the Bible’s words are important.   It’s like the story of the man whose devotional reading consisted of cracking his Bible at random and reading the first verse his finger touched.   He didn’t care about context, he was just wanting God to speak to him.   So, one morning this was his verse for the day: "And Judas went out and hanged himself."

That can't be it, he thought. So he tried again. "Go thou and do likewise" was his second hit when he randomly opened to another page.

Confused, he thought, the third time is the charm! It wasn't.  He opened the Bible and it read: "What thou doest, do quickly!"

Context means everything.   You simply can’t read any of the Bible or take it seriously without understanding some of it.   In one part of the Bible Jesus says “Judge not!”   In another place Jesus says ‘the way you judge, you’ll be judged’ assuming we will judge each other.   In another place Jesus says, “If you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword”, but then in another place, he also says, “I came not to bring peace, but a sword.”   Either this about contradictions, or it’s about context.   

We all know how many things we say or do could be taken out of context and used against us.   For example, if I’m at home and my wife says to me, ‘Are you out of your ever-loving mind?’  Now, she’s just expressing her disappointment in something I said or did.  But if we are at the doctor’s office, and she tells the doctor, “I think he out of his every-loving mind!”  I’m in even bigger trouble.  Context means a lot, right?

      Another example, says for example, if you’re fishing in a boat and someone says, “Will you get off the net?” you look around your feet to see if you are standing on the landing net.   But if you’re sitting at a computer and Mom or Dad says to you, “Will you get off the net?” you’re looking for the “Close Browser” button. Same word, but different surroundings make the word mean something completely different.

The point is, that everything depends upon the current context.   Here, we can’t rightly read James until we fully understand the ‘context’ which is why James writes and where James is coming from when he says what he does.    We can gain context in verse 15:  “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

What we understand from this context, is that James wasn’t writing concise doctrine, talking theory, nor trying to make a statement of whether or not faith in Jesus saves.   James is simply making a very practical point about what true having faith means in the real world.  Just saying all the right words or having the right beliefs is not what ‘saving faith’ is about.   “Even demons believe…”  He says.

If you want to get detailed about it, Ephesians also adds that ‘salvation by grace through faith’ is followed by with ‘good works’.   Even after Paul writes of being ‘justified by faith’, he goes on about living as a ‘living sacrifice’.   Paul too, like James here, both understand that saving faith will move from our heads to our hearts.    As James challenges, ‘You show me faith without works’ “I’ll show you my faith by good works.   You can tell when a person’s dead.  They aren’t moving.  They do nothing.   You can also tell when a faith is alive.  They are on the move.  They are doing something.  They (we) react positively to someone who’s in need.

 James isn’t negating ‘justification by faith alone’, he’s being practical, not theoretical.   He isn’t stating ‘how’ God saves.  He’s stating how God’s living, loving, and continuing gift of grace and salvation is lived out in us.  When we really ‘have it’, we’’ll want to “Pass It On” in both word and deed.  

I want to begin the sermon today by reading the first part of an article that appeared in Reader's Digest years ago.  The title of the article was "Mama Hale and Her Little Angels". The bold introduction read:   "The baby will not stop screaming. On the third floor of a brownstone in New York City's Harlem, a woman holds the two-week-old infant in her arms. The little body trembles and twitches with pain, but Clara Hale has no medicine to offer against that agony, unless you count love. In an old bentwood rocker, she soothes the hurting child. "I love you and God loves you," she promises. "Your mother loves you too, but she's sick right no, like you are." She coaxes the baby to nurse at a bottle. She bathes the child, croons softly, tries a little patty-cake game.

"After a while, maybe you get a smile," she tells a visitor. "So you know the baby's trying too. You keep loving it -- and you wait."

Clara Hale was 79 years old, a tiny, birdlike woman with nut-brown skin and a curling halo of white hair. "The baby craves something he doesn't understand," she explains. The "something" is heroin, and it may take a month before the baby is cleansed of the addiction that began in his mother's womb.

A physician, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a social worker have examined the infant and written a prescription the same one Mrs. Hale found by instinct 15 years ago, when she started cradling such drug-poisoned babies: lots of patience and calm, mixed with megadoses of love. Her cure works, but that is just the beginning of being one of "Mama Hale's children." (As Told by Maxie Dunnam from Claire Safran, The Reader's Digest, September 1984, pp. 49-50)

Clara Hale spent her lifetime caring for other women's children.  In a fifth-floor walkup building, she raised 40 foster children as well as three of her own.  It was a place that came to be known as Hale House, a unique haven of help for the helpless in the heart of the drug darkness of New York's Harlem.  By the time she was 79 years old, she cared for 487 babies of addicts.

Now, we may not be in that kind of situation, but we are always in a ‘situation’ where faith, hope, and love in action is being called for.   Mama Hale understood what James was writing about.  She put her faith into practice as a good work.      It’s a reminder that somehow, true faith will ‘work’, as the song says, ‘until Jesus comes.’   Or, to paraphrase what a brilliant theologian once said, "Whoever preaches (or lives) only one-half the Gospel still isn’t preaching or living the true gospel ( Based on Dr. Hans Kung, in Viewpoint, General Council on Ministries, January, 1987, page 4).

This points out why I don’t think we should say that James was writing to contradict Paul, but only to complete any misunderstanding of the gospel.   I’m sure there were differences in how they viewed things.  There always is.   No two people, nor two Christians see everything alike.  But what I like is that both Paul and James remain in the conversation together.   We need them both, for we can still lean too far in either direction:  We can forget what we can’t do to be saved, just like we can forget what we should do if we are saved.      

James was correcting some of the ‘empty’ ‘wordy’ and ‘head’ faith himself had witnessed within the churches.     James was aiming for the heart and for love.  For only by being who we say we are and doing what we say we’ll do, will we overcome such childish, infantile, immature faith.  Amen.